When it comes to selling your products online, product description SEO is really at the heart of the whole game. It’s what helps people to find your products in the first place, and hopefully to buy them.

So why, then, do so many ecommerce store owners treat their product descriptions as little more than an afterthought? It never fails to surprise me, because the product description is one of the most important parts of the site and an incredibly powerful SEO resource.

Whatever the reasons, I want to show you today some of the worst SEO mistakes that you can make in your product descriptions. Chances are, you’re doing at least one of them!

You Use the Manufacturer’s Description in Your Product Description SEO

This is probably the most common SEO clanger out there, as I see it all the time. Essentially, this is when you take whatever product description the manufacturer gives you and uses that for your product description with no effort to significantly change it.

If you’re doing it, so is everyone else, which means your product description doesn’t stand out from the crowd. Worse, Google hates duplicate content and will easily penalize you – and you can say goodbye to all your hard work optimizing your product description’s SEO.

Don’t Be Boring and Repetitive

This duplicate text problem with Google can also affect you when you repeat yourself too often. Now, if you’re selling a lot of virtually identical stuff in the same niche, then this can easily happen without thinking too much about it.

For example, you might have a beauty store. Typical copy that I would expect to see repeated on most, if not all pages, would be content like : “Money back guaranteed!” and “we use only the finest ingredients.”

What you need to do is go through that content and check that you are not repeating yourself when you try to sell and upsell your products. Try to change up phrases and give each page its own flair to maximize your product description SEO.

Write For Your Customers, Not You

One of the key principles in good copywriting is to write what your audience wants to hear. As someone in the industry, it can be easy to slip into jargon or talk about products from a more expert perspective.

However, this can lose customers. Usually, your customers aren’t in your industry and simply want your product(s) because they solve some kind of problem they have, or meets a desire that they have.

When writing a product description, think like your customers and write what they want to hear: show them how your product helps them. If you don’t have any ideas, now is a great time to check out how your strongest competitors do it. Don’t copy, of course – that would be bad for your product description’s SEO!

Don’t Treat Your Keywords Like Christmas Turkey Stuffing

In short, don’t stuff keywords into your product descriptions for SEO. While a limited amount of keywords helps Google and other search engines to index your content, stuffing the whole thing with keywords galore will make your description all but unreadable to your human visitors.

The best thing to do is have your keywords and include them in the copy naturally, preferably no more than two or three times. As a writer, I focus on the flow more than the keywords, helping them to blend into the copy more naturally – you should do the same.

Don’t Be Generic – Zone In On The Value of Your Offer

As well as using keywords, you want to make sure they’re not the generic one-size-fits-all keywords which your competitors are using. Instead, go deeper and find high-quality qualifiers and even relevant brand names to extract more juice from them.

This helps you to get more out of your long tail keywords in search results, while also putting you ahead of your generic competitors to really charge up your product description SEO. It’s also important to note that you want this individualism to shine throughout your description: let your customers know why they should buy from you and not the next link on Google.

Conclusion

Product descriptions are really the most important part of any ecommerce business, and they deserve a lot better than simply being a lazy copy-paste job. By spending a little more time and thought on your product descriptions, you won’t just enhance your product description SEO – you’ll also help your products to sell more and even build a better relationship with your customers. Don’t be afraid to push the boat out a little and let your store’s uniqueness shine through!